200609181250Paul Buckley, the art director behind Penguin Classics’ new comics themed covers is interviewed at Hear Hear:

PB: Yes, we all went to college reading those fairly drab Penguin Classics. And for that reason, simply because they were looking so stale, we revamped them 6 years ago, and have done our best to use more dynamic art and design. For the final redesign, I chose a combination of two of my favorite fonts – Futura and Filosofia, which left the covers still feeling “classicâ€? but much less stuffy and staid than their previous incarnation. I cannot tell you how happy I was to see that old look go and to watch how our Classics line is developing into the kind of imprint where I can pitch Tomer Hanuka to do Philosophy in the Boudoir and everyone gets excited by that idea. One of our recent Classics artists, Chester Brown, wrote his own flap copy on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and his headline was “Who D.H. Lawrence Fuckedâ€?, followed by a list of names / portraits… as I put this art out on the table, I thought for sure that this was going to go over like a turd in a punch bowl. But to my surprise, they just thought that the greatest thing, and it stayed, uncontested. When I told Chester that I could not believe he just got away with that, he told me how Lawrence fought for the normalcy of the word “fuckâ€?, claiming it was not a dirty word, served a fair purpose in our language, got a bad rap, etc – it turned out Chester did his research well, and now somewhere, D.H. Lawrence is smiling knowing that his battle for that little word is still being fought.